


Sacred Simplicity (Of You At My Side)

by DownToTheSea



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Asexual Relationship, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dancing, Domesticity, Established Relationship, Fluff, Historical, Humor, Other, Pining, Sleepy Cuddles, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2020-07-29 19:34:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20087614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DownToTheSea/pseuds/DownToTheSea
Summary: A collection of (mostly fluffy) Crowley/Aziraphale ficlets originally posted on Tumblr, set both during and post-canon.





	1. Arcade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt - "crowley/aziraphale + an arcade"

What the child of an important American diplomat wanted for his ninth birthday, the child of an important American diplomat got for his ninth birthday. And if, inexplicably, that child preferred to be driven to an obscure old-style arcade instead of contenting himself by mowing down virtual enemies on his new Xbox, then that was just the way it was.

Of course, neither the nanny nor the gardener would be expected to accompany the birthday party, but Antichrist Supervision wasn’t the sort of job that you fell down on, which was why Crowley and Aziraphale had doffed their disguises and were attempting to make themselves inconspicuous in a corner of the arcade. This might not have been difficult for Crowley, but Aziraphale…

“Video games,” Aziraphale said as if he still wasn’t quite sure it was a real phrase, as he watched Crowley destroy tiny pixel spaceship after spaceship, “were they one of yours, or one of ours?”

Crowley swiveled his head around to look at Aziraphale. His ship was quickly destroyed, but the machine seemed to be glitching rather a lot today, and his life counter didn’t go down when it reappeared at the bottom of the screen. “Neither.” He took his hand off the stick and gestured around him, but the ship continued moving on the screen. “100% humanity, right here.”

“Ah,” said Aziraphale, and peered around the room as if he was trying to discern exactly how his beloved humanity enjoyed such things. “It’s – it’s quite loud, isn’t it?”

“I hadn’t noticed.” Crowley pretended one of the aliens was Hastur and gleefully blew it up. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a Secret Service agent giving Aziraphale a suspicious look. Aziraphale smiled and waved back. His tartan bowtie bobbed slightly, like a waving flag that read “We Don’t Belong Here, Please Notice Us.”

“Stop that, angel!” he hissed. He abandoned Galaga and took Aziraphale’s arm, pulling him behind a block of games and out of sight. “You’ll get us both shot!”

Aziraphale looked down at Crowley’s hand on his arm and then back up, blinking very slowly. Crowley let go. “At least – try to blend in a little,” he implored. “And don’t go  _ waving  _ at any more trained assassins.”

“My dear, even trained assassins need to see a friendly face once in a while,” Aziraphale said a little reproachfully, but he reluctantly stationed himself at the nearest arcade game. “Now what exactly am I supposed to do?”

_ ~later~ _

“Yes!” shouted Aziraphale. “Yes, by Jove! It’s about d– er, it’s about time! Look, Crowley, I finally rescued the princess!”

Crowley sighed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is from Eric's Song by Vienna Teng because I'm a SAP for these two and it just fits them so wellllllll.


	2. Othello

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt - "things you said when you were drunk"

“My  _ dear  _ fellow,” Aziraphale shouted. “I really – I really cannot thank you enough for making the tragedies such a…  _ smashing  _ success.” He was shouting because he was too drunk to realize they were no longer in the crowded public house they had been earlier in the evening, after a showing of Shakespeare’s  _ Othello _ . They were now making their way home through the starlit streets of London, although neither of them had more than the dimmest idea of whose home they were aiming for.

“My pleasure!” Crowley shouted back, because he was just as drunk. “Did you see all the people crying in the audience? Hardly even – ” here he hiccuped “ – counts as a miracle!”

“Splendid!” Aziraphale beamed, having not absorbed a single word. Then his face fell, and his hand plucked at Crowley’s sleeve insistently. “Crowley. Crowley, wait. We – we shouldn’t discuss what happened in the play in front of everyone. It would quite ruin the surprise for them all.”

“…I reckon it would spoil it for everyone, wouldn’t it,” Crowley said with dawning, albeit fuzzy, glee. Oh, he was going to get usage out of that for  _ centuries _ .

“I do hope you enjoyed it,” Aziraphale said a moment later. “I know you prefer the comedies…”

Crowley made a noise that was supposed to include words but lost them somewhere between his throat and his mouth. He tried again, with a touch more success. “Ahh, yeah, I liked it well enough. Lodovico, you know, he wassss…” He waved a hand, slurring. “He was great.”

“Oh, I am glad.” Aziraphale beamed again. Crowley, with the hazy yet intense certainty of someone who was very drunk, abruptly knew that Shakespeare could write a play that contained nothing but the word “cabbages” repeated over and over and he would still make it a success to see Aziraphale smile like that.

He seized Aziraphale’s arm. “Angel,” he said, filled with an urgent need to  _ tell  _ him all of a sudden. _ I would do anything for you. I would follow you anywhere. I  _ love  _ you. _

“Mmm?” Aziraphale was only half-paying attention, gazing up and down the street as if it would speak and tell them where to go.

Crowley struggled for words to express the depth of his feeling. “…Cabbages,” he said thickly, gripping Aziraphale’s arm tight.

“And the same to you, my dear Crowley.”

Aziraphale smiled at him again, and Crowley couldn’t help but feel, in a blurry sort of way, that overall the evening had been a resounding success.


	3. Stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt - "things you said under the stars and in the grass"

It was five years after the apocalypse-that-wasn’t, and the cluttered bookstore in Soho and the artistically empty flat had been replaced by a cottage near the sea, crammed with books and plants and a jumbled assortment of things collected over several millennia, arranged in a way that Aziraphale called “charming” and the occasional visitor to their abode called “…shall we sit outside, then?”

On a warm, starry night, an angel and a demon vacated the charming interior and went outside. It would have been romantic to sit in the grass, but Aziraphale didn’t want to get grass stains on his coat, so he spread a blanket out while Crowley threw himself down, pointing out that he could simply miracle any stains away.

“But I like this better,” said Aziraphale, in whose opinion sitting in the grass might be all well and good and romantic, but terribly uncomfortable. (It prickled!)

Crowley shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He leaned back, folding his arms behind his head.

“How do you expect to see a thing in those?” Aziraphale reached over and pushed Crowley’s sunglasses up over his forehead and into his hair. Crowley blinked, snake eyes exposed suddenly. Aziraphale smiled to himself. He had grown quite fond of Crowley’s eyes, and it was always a joy to see them uncovered.

“You’re the one who wanted to go stargazing, angel. I’m just here for the alcohol and maybe a nap.” This was, of course, patently untrue and they both knew it.

“Have some wine then, my dear,” said Aziraphale, and handed him a glass.

Some time later, Crowley lifted a hand and pointed vaguely at a particularly bright spot of light. “I remember making that one. Can’t remember what the humans call it now; think I called it Dave at the time.”

“It’s very lovely,” Aziraphale murmured, shifting slightly so that Crowley could crawl further onto the blanket he had derided, pressing into Aziraphale’s side with his chin tucked into his shoulder.

“And there’s Alpha Centauri,” he said, finger shifting to a different speck of light. Aziraphale thought rather fancifully that it was shining extra bright, blazing silver out of the dark.

“Perhaps – we could go there someday,” he suggested. “On vacation, you know.”

Crowley didn’t say anything for a long moment, and he knew they were both thinking of how different things were the last time a trip to Alpha Centauri had been suggested. Before, Aziraphale would only have thought of what Heaven would say, and his own fear, and now… Now he was free – they both were, and together, and if they wanted to do silly things like vacation on Alpha Centauri there was nothing to stop them. He could have laughed with glee.

(The fact that the world hadn’t ended in fire and misery was also a big positive.)

“Yeah,” Crowley said at last, a little hoarsely. Aziraphale felt a hand slide into his where it rested atop his watch chain, fingers intertwining. “Yeah, that’d be good.”


	4. Thwarted

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt - "forehead touches or nose nudging or any soft variation on the theme"

When he woke up, Crowley actually had a pretty fair idea of what he wanted to do that day. First on the list was having breakfast with Aziraphale, which was really drinking copious amounts of coffee and watching Aziraphale eat, and listening to him recap everything he had read last night while Crowley was asleep. 

He wasn’t quite certain when that had turned into a Thing, but it had been chugging along peacefully for several years now, and Crowley had no inclination to stop it. Aziraphale  _ lit up _ so when he talked about his beloved books; it would have been like trampling on a baby bird to force him to stop. And even if Crowley was a demon, some things were just going too far – 

It was usually about this point when Crowley would remember that it didn’t matter what he was anymore, and that he would never again have to justify his actions to meet an Evil quota: that he could, in fact, do things simply because they made him… happy.

It was about  _ this  _ point that Aziraphale would look up from his tea and say, “Is everything quite alright, my dear?”

And Crowley would cough and say rather gruffly, “‘Course, fine. D’you need the butter?”

And Aziraphale would beam as though Crowley had offered him the sun and the stars instead, and say, “Yes, please,” and he would rest his hand on Crowley’s long after the butter had been relocated.*

Next on Crowley’s mental to-do list was looking after the plants, and possibly getting a few of the largest ones currently sitting around the cottage moved to the greenhouse where, hopefully, he would stop tripping over them.

Then he was planning to go for a bit of a saunter around the adjacent patch of woods and coax as much of the local fauna as possible to go tear up their neighbor’s garden. Crowley had an ongoing feud with the aforesaid neighbor, Mrs. Bishop (Aziraphale had pointed out the irony several times). There were not many people that Mrs. Bishop did  _ not  _ have an ongoing feud with, for that matter; Crowley watched the community Facebook page with glee every day to see what drama would unfold.

Last week, she had chased off a group of kids who had cut across a corner of her property with such ferocity that on their way past Crowley and Aziraphale’s several of them were still in tears. Two pairs of sympathetic celestial ears had been bent to their venting and several biscuits had disappeared from the platter Aziraphale kept on hand before the children’s mood improved. (The words ”No, angel, you aren’t cheering them up with your magic tricks” had also been spoken.)

Hence, Crowley had been plotting. Maybe he could make a utility crew “accidentally” cut her internet and phone off as well…

The first part of his list had gone off without a hitch. Aziraphale had polished off the last slice of toast, miracled the dishes clean (neither of them enjoyed  _ that  _ aspect of humanity), risen from his chair, and bestowed a soft kiss on Crowley’s cheek that definitely did not threaten to leave him a puddle of demonic goo on the kitchen floor.

But there his plans had stalled, for the simplest reason of all: it was raining. Hard. Crowley stood by the window and glared at the offending droplets battering their front lawn. The little apple tree he had planted by the front gate received an extra hard glare, as Crowley willed it to understand that if he saw  _ any  _ yellow or broken branches he would be Most Displeased.

He whirled from the window and began to sweep across the living room, but his efforts were quickly halted when he fell over a large potted plant in his path that he noticed a moment too late. Stumbling forward a few steps, he caught himself against a bookshelf and turned, clearing his throat.

Moodily, or as moodily as one can manage after one has just tripped over a plant, he threw himself down in the nearest chair. 

The chair was occupied. “Crowley, dear,” murmured Aziraphale, who had grown quite accustomed to being used as a pillow at random intervals. “Would you be so good as to – ah yes, perfect!“ as Crowley obligingly shifted so he could rearrange his book at a suitable angle.

"Thank you.” He accompanied this with another kiss to Crowley’s forehead. Marking his place with a finger, he closed the book and glanced outside. “Oh! Quite the downpour, isn’t it?”

To be more accurate, the downpour had been an hour ago. It was now a full onslaught, and their roof sounded as if it were being assailed by thousands of tiny watery bullets, but that had apparently escaped his cheerful notice until this precise moment.

Crowley made an aggrieved noise in the vicinity of Aziraphale’s collar, which he correctly interpreted.

“Well, the best laid schemes of mice and men…”

Crowley lifted his head. “And supernatural entities?”

“I should think so,” Aziraphale said, brow furrowing slightly.

He returned his attention to reading, and Crowley returned his attention to being annoyed; at least, he tried to, but Aziraphale had turned to half-bury his face in Crowley’s hair, and was now absently nuzzling him while he read.

Crowley teetered for a second, feeling that he really  _ should  _ make a cursory attempt to continue wallowing. But then Aziraphale brushed his nose across the crown of his head, and made a sort of happy humming noise, and Crowley was lost. His arm stole around Aziraphale, his eyes closed, and he sank into the warm comfort of his angel.

After all, he supposed, scheming could wait another day…

  
_ *Of course, Crowley  _ would  _ offer him the sun and the stars, and Aziraphale knew that he would, but this had as yet gone unspoken, and in any case it was very difficult to concentrate on grand romantic gestures when breakfast was getting cold. _


	5. Dancing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt - "slow dancing"

If a long, under-cooked noodle had been possessed by the spirit of an overenthusiastic disco ball, and the disco ball didn’t quite have a handle on this whole possession thing and wasn’t certain what to  _ do  _ with its noodle body, it still would have danced with more dignity than Crowley.

He gloried in it. Sure, he wasn’t obligated to act demon-y anymore (which was just as well since he had never been very good at being properly demonic) but he still enjoyed befuddling humans as much as ever, and the guests at Anathema’s wedding were prime for it. They were casting increasingly disturbed looks in his direction, and someone muttered that even if he’d drunk the entire bar, he would have been steadier on his feet than Crowley currently was.

Crowley only laughed, and clicked his fingers to ensure 70s pop hits continued playing despite the aggrieved DJ’s best efforts.

“Good Lord,” said Aziraphale, who had just returned from the buffet with a plate full of treats. “What on Earth are you doing?”

“What’s it look like I’m doing?” Crowley threw his arms wide and twirled in front of Aziraphale.

“Endangering everyone around you, for one thing,” Aziraphale said as one of Crowley’s flailing arms nearly smacked a passing couple in the face. In the background, the music changed. “Oh, for Heaven’s – is that  _ disco?” _ He wrinkled his nose.

“Yes!”

“This is Anathema’s wedding, dear,” Aziraphale chided. “Can’t you leave off and let her enjoy herself?”

“Ahh, no wedding’s complete without stuff like this! Gives you stories to tell afterwards.”

“Hmm.” Aziraphale snapped his fingers, and several things happened: a chair appeared next to him, he carefully set the half-finished plate down on it, and the music changed again. This time it turned into a much more wedding-appropriate instrumental rendition of “What a Wonderful World.” In the background, the put-upon DJ slumped with immense relief.

Aziraphale held out his hands. “May I have this dance?”

The lights dimmed, settling into an unmistakably romantic haze of soft blue and purple tones. Across the room, someone tripped and swore, but miraculously didn’t fall or stumble into anyone.

“Dance?” Crowley repeated, a proverbial record scratching in his head. “You… you only gavotte.”

“I  _ am  _ capable of trying new things, my dear.” Aziraphale offered him a soft smile. “On occasion.”

Aziraphale had spent the last several months reading every instructional book he could lay his hands on, determined that after all the lovely things Crowley had done for him over the years,  _ he  _ should make a chance to sweep  _ Crowley  _ off his feet. Anathema’s wedding had given him the perfect opportunity.

He had no idea how well his plan was working. In fact, Crowley was in danger of being swept off his feet so thoroughly he would have crashed to the ground and been trampled upon by vengeful fellow dancers.

“Well then,” he said weakly, and took Aziraphale’s hands. He felt as though “well then” was a phrase that was typically followed up with something else, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he fell silent and just let Aziraphale move one hand to his shoulder.

Since Aziraphale had only studied the theory and Crowley had never waltzed in his life, it could not have been said that they made a spectacular showing on the dance floor. (The low point was Aziraphale stepping back the wrong way and elbowing the happy couple.) After a few more minutes of stumbling around, they retreated to a corner and mostly swayed in place.

They stayed there even after the lights came up and the party resumed as normal. Occasionally, Aziraphale attempted a slightly more complicated step, giggling triumphantly whenever he succeeded and prompting a hidden smile from Crowley. At one point Crowley suggested that more practice was required, at which Aziraphale beamed and agreed.

But for the most part they simply held each other, and were content.


	6. Sleepy Cuddles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For cheer-up prompt #2 - Crowley/Aziraphale + falling asleep cuddling.

“You don’t have to do it  _ every  _ night, angel,” Crowley grumbled, though of course he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“Of course I do.” Aziraphale beamed at him, leaning over and bestowing a kiss on his nose. “I’m your guardian angel!”

Crowley groaned and covered his face with his hands. “You’re cheesier than a Hallmark film.”

“A what film?” Aziraphale sounded puzzled.

“One of my inventions.“ Crowley was really rather proud of how many boxes he had checked with that one. "Commercialization of Christmas. Sickening sweetness grates on people’s nerves, makes ‘em all snippy and more likely to sin. Starts arguments on the internet about whether the schoolteacher should have ended up with the reformed con artist or the lawman.”

“Oh, how dreadfully wily of you.“ Aziraphale didn’t sound nearly as disapproving as he should have. In fact, he kissed Crowley again. Furiously blushing, Crowley wriggled under the blankets until he was only a lump with red hair sticking out.

"For what it’s worth,” Aziraphale whispered. “My vote is for the confidence man.”

“Of course it is,” said the blanket lump with a valiant attempt at offhand sarcasm.

Aziraphale petted the tuft of hair. “Now, dear, are you going to come out? Of course if you’d rather I refrain I certainly will - ”

The blankets came off so fast they might have been miracled away.

“Suppose you can,” Crowley said, not even trying to sound casual anymore. He edged closer and Aziraphale bent over his head, pressing his lips to his forehead. Crowley’s eyes closed in pure bliss.

“Sleep well, my darling,” Aziraphale murmured. “And when you wake you’ll have had a lovely dream of whatever it is you like best.”

A sleepy grin spread over Crowley’s still-pink face. “You know it’s gonna be you, you bastard.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” Aziraphale lifted one arm so a place at his side opened up for use. “Now would you like to - oh…”

Crowley had already launched himself into the gap, wrapping an arm and a leg around Aziraphale and tucking his face into his shoulder.

Gently, Aziraphale settled his arm down around Crowley’s shoulders, pulling him in tighter. “Oh,” he said again, sighing happily. “Good night, my love.”

“Night.” Crowley, who did not so much fall asleep as will himself asleep when he imagined it was appropriate, could  _ not  _ imagine a world in which the soft, warm comfort of Aziraphale’s embrace failed to woo anyone to drop off immediately. He was out like a light. And true to his guardian angel’s promise, he woke up the next morning safe and, just a little, smiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My first Good Omens fic was the reverse of this, where Crowley miracled good dreams for Aziraphale. I couldn't resist writing it the other way around too! I imagine Aziraphale does this a lot to protect Crowley from nightmares.


End file.
